Psychology

This section is for people who live inside the world of feelings, patterns, and stories: therapists, coaches, counselors, and anyone who thinks in psychological terms.

The Inner Control Panel is meant to be a shared language between you and the people you work with. It doesn’t replace existing models; it gives you a cockpit analogy and five concrete systems you can map your current tools onto.

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See all Psychology articles → /tag/psychology/

Core orientation

Start with the big picture:

• The Dashboard and The Operator
  A client-friendly way to reframe “What’s wrong with me?” into “What is blinking?”
• The Five Dials
  A quick map of Energy, Recovery, Status, Attention, and Connection as clinical targets.
• The Shared Language of the Inner Control Panel
  How the “audio equalizer” metaphor becomes a Rosetta Stone between inner experience, symptoms, and interventions.

Working with motivation and energy

Instead of telling people to “try harder,” these pieces give you a more precise and compassionate way to talk about motivation and depletion.

• Beyond 'Trying Harder': Reframing Motivation as the Energy Management Imperative
  Keeps the familiar language of “motivation,” but grounds it in an Energy Management System that allocates resources in time. Useful when you want to validate a client’s experience and give them a concrete, biological frame.
• It’s Not Laziness, It’s the Stingy Energy CFO
  A story-driven way to explain “low motivation,” avoidance, and “I just can’t” days without shame, using the CFO metaphor instead of moral failure.

Recovery, stress, and “wired but tired”

• The Brake Pedal Is Stuck
  A psychological look at what happens when the nervous system can’t find the “off switch”—for clients who live between constant buzz and collapse.

(For more technical neurobiology of recovery and neuronal protection, see the Neuroscience section instead.)

The DBM as your backbone framework

If you want a structured model to plug into your existing approach:

• The Didomi Behavioral Model (DBM): A Systemic Framework for Human-Centric Design
  Introduces the five core systems (Energy, Recovery, Status, Attention, Connection) as design pillars. Written for a broader design audience, but highly useful as a mental map for how these systems interact in real people.
• Methods & Frameworks
  Overview of the Didomi Behavioral Model (DBM), the Levels Framework, and how we apply systems thinking to behavior.

Suggested use

You can use the ICP:

• as a psychoeducational frame in early sessions,
• as a way to locate where an intervention is actually acting (e.g., Recovery vs. Status),
• as a shared map when clients feel “everything is wrong” and need one dial to work on first.

Over time, this section will grow with more psychology-specific case examples and applications.